


Memories

by DeCarabas



Series: Fugitives Together [41]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:15:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of the ways Justice's memories spill over into Anders' life throughout the game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories

He notices it in his dreams first. Not the conscious exploration of the Fade that he’s been avoiding since they merged, or the Warden nightmares that keep dragging him back into the Deep Roads over and over again. Just ordinary dreams, full of ordinary places and faces from his past; boring scenes of being back in Kinloch Hold and getting lost on the way to old Sweeney’s lecture on spirit magic, somehow forgetting that he hasn’t been an apprentice for years now.

It starts with scenes of crumbling arches and the twisting branches of massive trees, places that he’s never seen in reality but that seem just as familiar as the halls of Kinloch Hold, and he doesn’t read much into that at first. Just dreams. But then there’s a series of dreams about sending soldiers off to die for a hopeless but worthy cause, and storming barred gates and tearing down the banner that hung there, and a woman’s anger as she scales a wall and draws a knife.

When he dreams of running late for dinner with his wife, Aura, complete with a rush of feelings that have nothing to do with Anders’ brief meeting in reality with Kristoff's widow, there’s no doubt where that came from. Waking from that one leaves him disoriented, with a vague sense of loss that lasts all morning.

After a few mornings like that, he starts looking for herbs to help block out his dreams.

* * *

It takes him longer to notice Justice’s memories spilling over into his waking life, beyond those confused moments when they first merged, when everything that should have been familiar seemed strange.

He’s seen the way his behavior’s changing, how hard it is to bite back any of his thoughts now, to pick his battles, like there’s some verbal filter that’s just disappeared; but that sense of recognition that he gets in his dreams doesn’t appear in his real life until the night he’s out gathering herbs near Sundermount and chooses a campsite too carelessly. He wakes up to a ring of shambling corpses pressing against his protective glyphs. And as he reaches for his mana, he’s filled with a deep, disgusted horror for the demons trapped in those decaying forms, mindlessly acting out the memories of their host body’s final battles, any sense of self long since lost.

And then he’s glowing, and then there’s nothing left of the corpses to possess.

He spends the rest of the night intensely conscious of the need for his lungs to draw breath, the constant rhythm of his pulse beneath his skin, the sweat on his palms and the blinking of his eyes and all the thousand signs that this body is alive, long after Justice’s mental tone has faded from his mind.

* * *

There are ruins in the highlands of the Dales where Hawke pats the head of a wolf statue and talks about missing his dog, and then about wishing Merrill was here; and Anders looks at the shore of a lake and recognizes something in the shape of it, remembers a time when the Veil was so thin here that he could have walked right through. And not for the first time, he wonders just how far back Justice’s memories go.

There’s a crumbling wall where there should be towers with intricately ornamented windows, and he remembers watching a woman take her final stand here, surrounded by so much death that he could see it all through the Veil with crystal clarity. She’d tried to send her people away, but they’d stayed because they believed her cause was righteous; and so she led them, though she knew they couldn’t win.

For Justice, this had been a good memory. He’d admired her.

It still feels like a good memory to him. It’s only when he tries to describe it to Hawke that he realizes that’s changed.

“Justice admired a mortal? Really?” Hawke says, and Anders laughs.

“Don’t pretend that’s a surprise. Fishing for compliments?”

Surrounded by the scents of pine and arbor blessing, ancient ruins and warm summer breezes, with no one around for leagues but the two of them, it’s hard to remember this is still part of Orlais. But the main roads they’re avoiding are clogged with soldiers, and the towns are full of talk that the empress should do something about the rising tensions in the Circles, step in and make the mages and the templars quiet down—at sword-point, if necessary.

He won’t let this become yet another memory of a lost cause.


End file.
